Even by the standards of dictatorships, the Burmese junta of General Than Shwe has astonishingly little sense of humour. And, in a regime such as this, life was never going to be easy for the Moustache Brothers.

For 30 years the three comedians have charmed their audiences and irritated the authorities with their mixture of traditional Burmese clowning and topical satire. Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese democracy leader, is one of their fans. Like her, two of the Moustache Brothers have already served long prison sentences.

So it was little surprise when, late at night two weeks ago, five members of the Burmese special branch knocked at the door and led away Par Par Lay, the star of the group. He was given no time to pack spare clothes. Since then his family, whose cramped front room serves as the troupe’s miniature theatre, have heard nothing about his health or whereabouts.

Like Rangoon, Mandalay is a city under nightly curfew, still reeling from the crackdown on the huge antigovernment demonstrations, which brought a wide cross-section of people – students, office workers and the minority Muslim population – on to the streets in support of the marching monks. The repression began two days later than in Rangoon but was decisive. There are no confirmed deaths but there are rumours of mass arrests and secret trials of protest organisers.

Despite the crackdown, yesterday, as every day, the two remaining Moustache Brothers, assisted by their wives, performed once again the show that has got them all into such hot water. It begins with an announcement by Lu Maw, the troupe’s spokesman, in his characteristically exuberant English: “No 1 Moustache, Par Par Lay, is taken away. He in the slammer, up the river, in the clink – he jail bird!” Later he says: “He’ll be OK. He knows how to live in prison – he just makes a joke about everything. But his wife is worried because he has no clothes, and we don’t know where he is. And the police will tell us nothing.”

It is a sign of the brittleness of the Burmese regime that, as well as the democracy activists and Buddhist monks who organised and led last month’s demonstrations, it has suppressed artists and entertainers who have spoken out in support of them.

In Rangoon, a comic actor known as Zargana was arrested after organising a contingent of performers and writers to take part in the marches. Par Par Lay’s most recent crime was to do the same thing in his home city of Mandalay, the old royal capital, where most of the 400,000 monks in Burma live. The Moustache Brothers, however, have been a buzzing mosquito in the ear of the dictatorship for decades. Their comedy is in the tradition known as a-nyeint pwe, a combination of dance, folk plays, sketches and slapstick performed by troupes of travelling players.

“My grandfather was comedian, my father was comedian and I chip off the old block,” said Lu Maw, a grinning, manic man of 58. Par Par Lay first served time in prison in 1990, but the pivotal moment for the Moustache Brothers came in 1996 at a performance in Rangoon for Ms Suu Kyi’s political party, the National League for Democracy. The show, recorded on video and circulated underground ever since, was a tour de force of subversive wit puncturing the bombast of General Than Shwe’s regime.

Within days, the Brothers had been hauled in. Par Par Lay and Lu Zaw (actually a moustacheless cousin) were given seven years’ hard labour. After a letter-writing campaign by British and American comedians, the two were released after five years and seven months, much of it spent in leg shackles breaking stones. To make matters worse, they were denied the licence required to perform their art at weddings and parties. With little alternative, they reinvented themselves as international comedians performing to foreign tourists, in English.

Deprived of Moustache No 1, Lu Maw, Lu Zaw and the wives none the less romped through their hour-long routine yesterday, a bizarre stream of Burmese classical dance, jokes about randy henpecked husbands and Lu Maw’s personal thesaurus of colloquial English phrases, all recounted through an antique microphone.

Like many people in Burma the Moustache Brothers oppose the tourist boycott supported by the British Government. “Burmese people need tourists,” Lu Maw said. A prominent sign in English reads “Moustache Brother under surveillance” – nervous tourists go pale when Lu Maw announces that if the secret police carry out a raid he will scarper out the back leaving the audience to get beaten up. “I joking!” he adds reassuringly. Lu Maw’s 82-year-old father sits outside keeping an eye out for spooks.

Like everyone else in Burma, though, the Brothers are utterly vulnerable to a government that recognises no constraints on its power. For his imprisoned brother, Lu Maw sees only one hope: another campaign by international celebrities. “You know Hugh Laurie? You know Eddie Izzard?” he asks. “Please tell Richard Gere – and tell Steven Seagal. Make this public over the world, and then my brother will come back quickly.”

Comic heroes

— “In the past, thieves were called thieves. Now they are known as government workers” - the joke told at a rally for Aung San Suu Kyi that put Par Par Lay and Lu Zaw in jail nearly six years

— “Now we are safe. We will run out the back door and they will just arrest the tourists. I’m only joking. I’m a comedian”

— Playing on the similarity of the Burmese words for “hit” and “right”: an activist is shot by a general but refuses to die. “You’ve been hit – die,” orders the general. “Why should I die if I am right?” the activist responds

— Lu Maw throws fistfuls of worthless banknotes into the air each night and uses a policeman’s helmet to collect the “bribes ”

— “You cannot close my mouth, ears and eyes. If you want to do that, it would be better not to release me” – Par Par Lay on his release from prison in 2001

(Sources: www.burmanet.org; www.moustachebrothers.com; Times archives)

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